And Now China Has Angered Australia

China may have made a new geopolitical foe due to its talks with
Fiji: Australia.

Last week China sent its top legislator, Wu Bangguo, to the tiny
pacific nation of Fiji. During the trip, Fiji Prime Minister
Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama and Wu signed three economic pacts.
According
to reports from the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation, the
agreement included a 200 million Fiji dollar loan (around $114
million) for road construction.

China supports the Fiji people's rights to choose the
development path on their own and will continue to provide aid
within its capacity to Fiji, said Wu.

Fiji has not been a functioning democracy for many years. The
latest military coup in 2006 (one of many in the country's
history since independence) eventually installed Frank
Bainimarama, the leader of the coup and head of the
island's armed forces, as the country's interim Prime Minister.
Due to a lack of democratically held elections, Fiji was
suspended from both the Commonwealth of Nations and the Pacific
Islands Forum in 2009.

Fiji's neighbors — Australia and New Zealand — have regularly
pushed for a return to democracy in the country and China's
political support for the country's government has not gone
unnoticed. The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday published an
article called
"China picks Fiji as venue for new geopolitical fight".

Anne-Marie Brady, a specialist on China in the south Pacific at
the University of Canterbury, told John Garnaut, the paper's
Beijing correspondent:

''It means Fiji is the political football in the
geo-political contest between China and the US ... It is very
much like the cold war. It's an insult to Australia and New
Zealand and it's also an insult to the Pacific Islands.''